Sunday, September 20, 2009

Dog Day Afternoon

It really was a dog day afternoon.

At noon I packed up Barkley for what I hoped would be his last trip to Petco. Ashley had told me that there were 3 inquiries about him this week (possibly due to our changing the spelling of his name from "Barkley" to "Berkley.")

When I dropped him off, I asked Stacey about getting gift cards for Petco so I could buy some more Step 2 for the puppies. She gave me two cards, $20 each, so I bought the last can of Step 2 and a bag of the smallest size puppy kibble I could find, hoping to start adding that to the Step 2 before I run out of it.

From there I drove to the SPCA Thrift store to pick up another bag of Esbilac, puppy formula. I am not going to need much more of it, but I will need some more before these guys are completely off of it.

My car now had a sack of puppy kibble, a sack of puppy formula and a can of intermediate puppy food.

I drove home and alternately played with and cleaned up after puppies. I'd forgotten that this is the stage of puppy development when we have towels all over the floor all the time. Washing all the towels and their bedding took two loads of wash. I got them settled into the playpen for naps in clean bedding.

Additionally, the puppies have worms. Two years ago this would have grossed me out, but when I saw Eliza trying to expell this long string of what I at first thought was feces but which turned out to be a long white worm, I just grabbed it and pulled it out. Higgins also vomited once and possibly twice today, which I suspect is also part of the worm condition.

When I returned to Petco to get Barkley, someone was being interviewed about adopting him, so I decided to shop for food for our dogs. Ashley stopped me and said she had a sack of puppy kibble for me. I took it because you can never have too much puppy kibble, I have realized! I took that to the car and then went back to get some diet dog food for Lizzie and Sheila, using the last of the Petco Cards (since I figure it was retroactive food for Barkley, who had been sharing our dogs' food--and it only paid for half the bag of food anyway).

I ran into Kim, who was interviewing Barkley's new family and she said "have you seen your new dog?"

Oh. I forgot about the new dog.

I put the two sacks of new kibble in the car and went back to find the new dog. Pretty soon someone came out with this pile of towels out of which poked a tiny face.

Our new foster is another chihuahua with Demodex, like the Royal Puppies, except this one is going to have darker fur because his skin looks more black and purple than the Royal Puppies, who were quite pink.

He's also a lot more scabby than the Royal Puppies were.

Ashley loaded me up with medicine for Demodex and medicine for worms and promised to e-mail me with dosages and get me a needle to inject one of the Demodex meds.

They gave me the honor of naming the new pup (who is about 3 months old) and after first considering JoJo (for the character in Seussical, which I saw last night), I realized that since he has Demodex, I should name him Dexter. So we now have Dexter.

Dexter is a little overwhelmed with the house. He's about the height of the puppies, but they probably outweigh him by a lot. He doesn't know if he wants to be in my lap or on the floor, but he did sleep in my lap for a bit while I watched "The Secret Life of Bees," while everybody was napping.

The puppies found a quiet spot behind the playpen to sleep.

(Freddie's head is under the back end of the treadmill)

During the movie Walt called twice, once from Logan Airport in Boston and once from O'Hare in Chicago, where he was changing planes. I wonder if he's ready to be plunged back into the madness of this doghouse!